We consider the Dirichlet problem for a class of second-order nonlinear degenerate elliptic equations with \(L^1\) -right-hand side in a bounded open set \(\varOmega \subset \mathbb {R}^n\) ( \(n\geqslant 2\) ). The coefficients of the equations satisfy the growth and coercivity conditions involving a growth parameter p and a weighted function \(\mu \in L^\infty (\varOmega )\) such that the set \(\{t>0:1/{\mu }\in L^t(\varOmega )\}\) is nonempty. We prove a number of results on the existence and nonexistence of weak solutions of the given problem. The value \(t_{\mu }=\sup \{t>0:1/{\mu }\in L^t(\varOmega )\}\) plays an important role in our study. In particular, we describe cases where the inequality \(p>2-1/n+1/t_{\mu }\) is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a weak solution of the considered problem for every right-hand side in \(L^1(\varOmega )\) .